Gandhinagar (09.03.2023): It was widely reported in media that Director of Fisheries the Gujarat government Nitin Sangwan (IAS: 2016: GJ) was held hostage during his visit to a village near the Dharoi dam in the Sabarkantha district of the state. The officer was even reportedly beaten up by a group of men associated with fishing activity. But this turned out to be wrong reporting and clarification is issued.

The officer himself clarified, “The incident is highly over-reported in media. I had gone for an inspection and the parties (beneficiaries of scheme, mainly tribal) were dead drunk on the occasion of Holi i.e March 6. There were gross irregularities in the implementation of a scheme. The drunk and panicked scheme beneficiaries over-reacted. Everything is OK and incident is two days old. And there was no hospitalization as wrongly reported by some media, nor there was any ‘thrashing’.” 

As per the police too, it is suspected that the detection of alleged irregularities in a fisheries project led to the incident. Sangwan was accompanied by his subordinate staff during the visit to the village on March 6.

Police have arrested three people for their alleged involvement in the attack and efforts are on to identify and nab the other accused. The bureaucrat and his team went to Ambavada village near the Dharoi dam built on the Sabarmati River for inspection of a fisheries project wherein the state government provides subsidy to local contractors to start "cage culture fishing" in the dam water.